President Obama makes the thumbs up sign as he ends a speech about his ConnectED goal of connecting 99% of students to next generation broadband and wireless technology within five years, Tuesday, Feb. 4, at Buck Lodge Middle School in Adelphi, Md

Today, President Obama visited Buck Lodge Middle School in Adelphi, Maryland to announce major progress on the ConnectED initiative, designed to enrich K-12 education for every student in America. ConnectED empowers teachers with the best technology and the training to make the most of it, and empowers students through individualized learning and rich, digital content.

Preparing America’s students with the skills they need to get good jobs and compete with countries around the world relies increasingly on interactive, personalized learning experiences driven by new technology. Yet fewer than 30% of America’s schools have the broadband they need to connect to today’s technology. Under ConnectED, however, 99% of American students will have access to next-generation broadband by 2017. That connectivity will help transform the classroom experience for all students, regardless of income.

As the President announced today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will invest $2 billion over the next two years to dramatically expand high-speed Internet connectivity for America’s schools and libraries — connecting more than 20 million students to next-generation broadband and wireless. He also announced that private-sector companies have committed more than $750 million to deliver cutting-edge technologies to classrooms, including:

Apple, which will donate $100 million in iPads, MacBooks, and other products, along with content and professional development tools to enrich learning in disadvantaged U.S. schools

AT&T, which pledged more than $100 million to give middle school students free Internet connectivity for educational devices over their wireless network for three years

Autodesk, which pledged to make their 3D design program “Design the Future” available for free in every secondary school in the U.S. — more than $250 million in value

Microsoft, which will launch a substantial affordability program open to all U.S. public schools by deeply discounting the price of its Windows operating system, which will decrease the price of Windows-based devices

O’Reilly Media, which is partnering with Safari Books Online to make more than $100 million in educational content and tools available for free to every school in the U.S.

Sprint, which will offer free wireless service for up to 50,000 low-income high school students over the next four years, valued at $100 million

Verizon, which announced a multi-year program to support ConnectED through up to $100 million in cash and in-kind commitments

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President Obama visits Buck Lodge Middle School

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Dotster: President Obama’s announcements today are so important in bringing opportunity and advantage to all. I know my Ct. grandkids’ school has provided ipads to all students for 2 or 3 years now. It’s a great neighborhood school with kids from all backgrounds due to participation in a successful bussing program from the inner city. I’m not sure of the details, but I know they have a real aggressive PTO which went after grants and donations from the business community for funding for the ipads and other innovative programs. Similar advantages at the very diverse h.s. where my daughter teaches in Indy which has state of the art everything. Eli Lilly there and other corporate donors have also figured out that an educated, successful community is good for them, good for all. A win-win. It is very encouraging that this kind of opportunity will now be more widely available——it will indeed make a huge difference. Good to see the corp. community stepping up, doing some good for a nice change.

The ConnectED initiative will, within five years, connect 99 percent of America’s students to the digital age through next-generation broadband and high-speed wireless in their schools and libraries. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon are already providing their support, collectively pledging to connect more than 15,000 schools and 20 million students by the end of 2015.

ConnectED will also provide better broadband access for students in rural areas, by expanding successful efforts to connect parts of the country that typically have trouble attracting investment in broadband infrastructure.

Training teachers

Our teachers are being asked to do more than ever, and they need to be equipped with better tools to help them succeed. Fortunately, technology can play a central role in this.

For example, new digital education tools that allow for real-time assessments of student learning, provide more immediate feedback to drive professional development, and enable the creation of interactive online lessons can empower teachers to understand each student’s strengths and weaknesses and design lessons and activities that better meet their needs.

The ConnectED initiative invests in improving the skills of teachers, ensuring that every educator in America receives support and training in using education technology tools that can improve student learning.

Additionally, ConnectED will lead to new resources for teachers from any school, at any time, to open their classrooms to interactive demonstrations, lessons from world-renowned experts, or the opportunity to build learning communities and to collaborate with other educators across the country or world.

Encouraging private-sector innovation

Educational devices supported by high-speed networks are the portal to the world of online learning and interactive content, to personalized education software that adapts to students’ needs, and to breakthrough advances in assessing understanding and mastery.

These devices give students access to more rigorous and engaging classes, new learning resources, rich visualizations of complex concepts, and instruction in any foreign language. They also give students more opportunities to work at their own speed and receive additional one-on-one help they need to develop their knowledge and skills.

Leading technology companies are capable of producing feature-rich educational devices that are price-competitive with basic textbooks. And a robust market in educational software can unlock the full educational potential of broadband investment, while creating American jobs and export opportunities in a global education marketplace of more than $1 trillion.

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President Obama greets a member of the audience during a visit to Buck Lodge Middle School

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James Richardson, principal of Buck Lodge Middle School, celebrates with his students and teachers after President Barack Obama spoke at their school

Can you guys keep a secret? 🙂 Mr. Muscatinegal came home from his volunteer shift at the food pantry this noon to tell me about one of his fellow volunteers. It seems that this guy won’t be volunteering anymore, because he’s taking a $50K job with the Iowa campaign of a certain Dem presidential candidate. It’s apparently a big secret (although he told Mr. Muscatinegal and, indirectly, me) – but this candidate is supposedly planning to announce on May 1. Hope they do better in Iowa this time – last time they came in 3rd here… 😀

Top advisers and former aides to Barack Obama say Hillary Clinton is repeating the mistakes she made in 2008, building a machine in lieu of a message and lumbering toward the Democratic nomination with the same deep vulnerabilities that cost her the nomination eight years earlier.

[…..]

“I just don’t see any strategic value in stories positioning her as inevitable or the preemptive nominee, and I don’t think people who are out there talking about this help her, and I think she should make that clear,” said Joel Benenson, Obama’s chief campaign pollster and now the top White House pollster. “She doesn’t need this. If she decides to run for president, everybody knows she’s going to be able to raise money, everybody knows she’s going to be extremely formidable, that she’s going to have a significant network of supporters around the country — so what’s the value of all this in 2014?”

She will crash and burn – this time even faster than she did in 2007 because she is older, physically and mentally slower, less appealing to younger voters and minorities, and thus has a smaller margin of error.

WOW. Benenson is first-rate. It’s amazing he’s willing to go on record with these comments but they are the real truth. She’s making terrible strategic errors and she’s had 8 YEARS to think about this.

It’s absolutely stupid timing and would turn media attention to her when everyone should be focused on the primaries for 1914. We do not need someone taking up all the oxygen when we have Governor, House and Senate seats to win. If she wants to hire an army she’s welcome to do so as long as they go about their work quietly building the kind of field campaign that PBO did.

Well, don’t feel bad telling the big secret. Impossible that this won’t leak very very very soon in the press. Too many people involved. Surprising that it is so so soon. On the other hand, it’s about preventing other candidates from building some serious challenge I think. And it could be about creating democratic momentum for the mid-terms. I don’t know…

The “candidate” will be forced to take position on a number of issues. Gosh… I cringe just imagining how the media will characterize the President as a lame duck, only one year into his second term. I honestly thought President Obama would have another year before the media gives all the spotlight to “that candidate”.

Note: Ed Rendell was so full of it when he said Hillary, “genuinely” doesn’t know if she’s going to run. The decision has been made ages ago.

Thinking more about this idea to announce before the mid-terms…. It’s all about her campaigning for democrats in November. The good aspect is that she can help in portions of the country where racial insecurity is high. The not so good aspect is that she steals some thunder from the president when he’s only one year into his presidency.

As if Barack Obama didn’t have enough challenges. Now a primary campaign where one candidate is so so ahead of the others she’ll be considered, the minute she announces, as an EQUAL co-leader of the democrats. Very different situation if there was a true battle for the nomination. Well, at least, the “co-leadership” thing will be out in the open. The Clintons have been very influential behind the scenes for years, often undermining the President’s leadership. He’s had to “share” the leadership with them since the beginning. Because they were still passionate about politics and about power and WERE NOT READY TO RETIRE.

I knew that it would be more difficult than usual for Barack Obama, not only because of his race, but because he had beaten a very very powerful political machine, and , for goodness sakes, the wife of a president !!

That being said, watch President Obama being very very gracious and use the circumstances to push harder for his agenda. “Never let them see you sweat”. President Obama is a very generous man, an unselfish man. But sometimes it must be hard for him to accept that everything, I mean, everything, is always more challenging than it was for others.

Maybe I’m not being fair. I don’t know. I’ve just watched this man getting treated with double standards FOR YEARS. He’s never given his due. He’s blamed for things he doesn’t have control of, and OTHERS are taking credit for all the good he’s done. He’s disrespected, while he has to be the politician the most WORTHY of respect , for his brilliance, his wisdom, his generosity and his integrity. The media will get worse I’m afraid.

MLK had a 28% approval rating at the time of his death. Now MLK is canonized not just by the public, but by the same media that vilified him while he was alive. I would wager that Rosa Parks went thru something quite similar, as did Nelson Mandela and others. However, h I also believe that history will be a lot kinder to PBO, and a lot SOONER than it has been to MLK or Rosa Parks – probably in time for him to witness it himself (like Mandela).

The Clintons will have their place in the regular political archives, but history will not bestow upon them the greatness and consequentiality that rightfully and singularly belongs to PBO.

The fact that the media says something doesn’t make it so. The media’s spotlighting and anointing Hillary prematurely will NOT serve her well, and will not hurt PBO as much as you think. The media has been calling him “lame duck” since Scott Brown won the MA special election back in Feb 2010 — now where is Scott Brown? OUT of office, and looking for attention by prancing around half naked at events.

As many others have stated, Hillary is making the EXACT mistake she did in 2008 (with flawed “advice” from the GOP media/pundits and moneyed interests), and she is going to crash and burn as she did in 2008 – except this time, it will be a lot faster, because she is older, slower, and even less appealing to younger people and minorities than she was back in 2007.

She just bothers me – it is to her benefit to have a gop congress in 2014 so she can sweep in the democrats in 2016 – and do what with such a congress? I have no idea what she stands for – how she would improve the lives of the 99% – maybe I will find out?

People who believe in gravity even if it’s only a theory will want to be aware that religion has issued a challenge to science and you have a front row seat right here at The Creation Museum.

A debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ken Ham the And Then Eve Gave Adam An Apple Guy will be shown on the internet machine starting at 7:00 tonight Eastern Time. That’s 6:00 normal people time.

They promise it will be available on You Tube after the debate but warn …….
(snip)
I suspect how long it remains online depend on how much Bill Nye wins. Wink. Wink.

A fantastic President and a wonderful policy. Generations will look back on this moment as a significant and positive step in the education of all. They will look back on this moment as one where President Barack Obama stood up for those without an obscene amount of zeros behind their names and showed them with action, that someone is fighting for them. Someone is looking out for them. Someone has their back and he will not let their country fail them.

Indeed NW- it is these seemingly “little” policy actions that will yield the most positive and transformative results in the lives of ordinary citizens, and thus move this country forward, not the Keystone pipeline approval/disapproval or public/private option. These are the kinds of things I think about when I go to the polls and cast my vote.

Just had the opportunity to listen to Senator Reid speaking from the Senate floor. He is truly hurting from the repetitive dishonest and persistent obstruction of the Republicans. He quoted Senator George Mitchel – ‘the Republicans will always break your heart.’

It may be that this is the week that he and the Dems end the 60 vote requirement for cloture.

Urge all of you to contact him and respectfully encourage him to do what I now have zero doubt the Republicans will do, as their first order of business, should they ever become a majority in the Senate.

Greenwald and Poitras’ red-eye flight from New York to Hong Kong. Greenwald described their behavior like so as they read the documents:

“We would just cackle and giggle like schoolchildren. We were screaming and hugging and dancing with each other up and down,” he says. Their celebrations woke up some of their neighbours; they didn’t care.

Snowden sure isn’t laughing in Russia – so that didn’t last too long. Seriously acting like the “spies” of the 50s, 60s, 70s – escaping from the clutches of the law – to places where they really do not want to be.

American Promise spans 13 years as Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, middle-class African-American parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., turn their cameras on their son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, who make their way through Dalton, one of the most prestigious private schools in the country. Chronicling the boys’ divergent paths from kindergarten through high school graduation, this provocative, intimate documentary presents complicated truths about America’s struggle to come of age on issues of race, class and opportunity.

Here’s the big point about Keystone:
Owners of the oil refineries in Texas are happy to risk our safety so that they will be the ones preparing Tar Sands very dirty oil for market.
Ed’s blather along with Brian Shweitzers nonsense are distractions from the real issue.

If the USA refuses to allow Keystone either that oil will be shipped to China and China will profit from refining it or the oil will stay in the ground.

To be clear—–The big money wants to profit from shipping and cleaning the oil. This is pretty much ONLY about that.

The noise about which is safer rail or pipeline is a way to confuse and divide us.

Nobody is now saying that the USA will get any of the oil. That has been uterly disproved.
So Americans are being asked to sacrifice their safety and homes—-remember the ugly spill in Arkansas that Rachel covered last year??

Ordinary Americans are being asked to take the risk so that Oil refinery owners can get even richer.

Please someone here adept on Twitter can you boil down these points to a tweet?

Something like “Americans won’t be getting any of the tar Sands Oil, only the risks.
The benefits of KXL go solely to Oil Refinery owners.

WASHINGTON (AP) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. will pay nearly $1.5 million to settle a federal sexual harassment lawsuit that alleged the company created a hostile work environment for female mortgage bankers at its office outside Columbus, Ohio.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says the settlement money will be divided among 16 women who worked at the bank’s call center in its Polaris Park office.

The lawsuit alleged that the office allowed sexually charged behavior and comments from supervisory staff and other mortgage bankers that resulted in a “sexist atmosphere.” The government said female mortgage bankers who did not tolerate the unwelcome actions were ostracized and deprived of lucrative sales calls and other benefits.

The company issued a statement saying it agrees harassment and discrimination have no place in the work environment.
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They are starting the new year out like they ended the old year. Jamie Dimon needs another raise !

Part of the Bastardization of News in US today. CBO was Factual and had data to support their report. Nothing is wrong with people having opinions. However, when there are Data, then Rubin should not be allowed to opine Falsely.

Rubin has been writing that up is down and left is right and right is wrong and whatever as long as I have known she existed. She – and those like her – is yet another reason why the media is losing money and influence day after day.

Bush didn’t need to “play hardball” with the media because they were part of the same institution as him and they both worked FOR one another. I’m not sure why this is so difficult for people to understand. This WH has very different and much steeper hill to climb than the Bush WH where the media is concerned. It is unfair and intellectually dishonest to pretend that if only PBO “played hardball” or “strong-armed” the media, then the disinformation and misinformation we encounter would magically disappear. Nothing could be further from truth.

Right now as I’m typing this, ABC news is busy trying to question the WH’s correction of the media’s deliberate misinterpretation of the newly released CBO report. The President and his administration have a country to govern – they cannot and should not be expected to be constantly refuting misinformation in the media or threatening reporters (like Grimm).

Thank you, well said!! The media does not even care about cratering ratings. It has mutual interest with the republicans- taxes and anything for a profit, as well as low wages for the working man and woman.